For agaru/ageru, you kinda make the “a” sound when saying “rise” and the “e” sound when saying “raise”
Yeah, it’s all much more complicated. Some things can be determined by rules around 人 as a suffix (just being at the end does not mean it’s being a suffix). Otherwise, in many cases it depends on when the word was incorporated from Chinese.
You’re right about transtivity, but most beginners aren’t well versed about which verb meaning is transitive and which one isn’t which makes pairing the verb to its meaning difficult. So a mnemonic device unrelated to that is helpful.
And of course what I said is not a rule, but it will help in the beginning. I also recommended writing them down if they give people that much trouble.
Cheers!
Yes, this.
This is the best way to do it for vocab + kanji: focus on learning the vocabulary words, including the accompanying kana, instead of worrying too much about the onyomi and kunyomi readings and similar reading issues.
Hmmm, not sure how useful this advice is, but, when trying to associate a word with it’s meaning, focus more on the hiragana part than the kanji itself. If you make a strong association between the reading and the meaning, in your mind, it’ll be easier to recall it. At least it is for me.
Try to remember “artificial” is じんこう (and make a note of the kanji used, but focus on the reading more), then when you see the kanji 人工 in a review, try to guess the reading. Did you remember any にんこう words? hmmm, no… what about じんこう? Oh I know that one, it’s “artificial”. Bingo! It’ll be harder when there are multiple answers you can think of, but that’s the basics of it.
Hopefully it helps.
I guess I’m a little sympathetic to that? But you also literally can’t understand how to use 上げる/上がる without understanding transitivity, so I guess my stance is that beginners should like, learn that though.
Do you say the words out loud when you are studying and reviewing?
I find this really helps, even just mouthing them silently helps break it out of the abstract and into the physical and really helps lock in the words.
The other thing is to be reading and listening these words in context. A lot of these words are going to be in the most basic of Japanese textbooks so working on your grammar will help and say it out loud.
I still get it wrong, sometimes.
Nin for nintendo, is what I now do.
So like 悪人 = にん because wario is from nintendo and he’s a bad person
商人 しょうにん he probably sells nintendo’s
美人 Could go with nintendo women, but real life women are more beautiful. (i guess?) so じん it is.
Anyway, think about it long enough, make it weird enough and some things should eventually stick. If not, just stick to always guessing one of the two, at least you’ll get half right xD
Different people’s brains work differently, but I’ll tell you what works for me: focusing on the sound of the word and repeating it as often as I can in my head. I’d never write たじん for 他人 not because of any rule or mnemonic, but because I don’t remember ever having heard that sound, so it sounds funny whereas たにん sounds familiar.
Obviously this works less well for words where a misreading of the kanji produces sounds that correspond to some other word, but even in that case something just feels off when reading it the wrong way for a word. I had this experience learning French, too… it felt like I was accumulating a collection of mental audio recordings and associations in my head and in so doing developing a good gut sense of when something seemed right or wrong, as opposed to applying rules to arrive at that more analytically.
That’s exactly what I do!
Earlier today while doing reviews I got the reading for 産業 (さんぎょう) wrong because I pronounced it as ざんぎょう (残業) in my head. I realized my mistake but it happened so fast I couldn’t stop the reflex of smashing enter
For ageru/agaru and sageru/sagaru I just remember that garu is what I do to myself(i.e. falling) and geru is what I do to someone or something else…
No idea how to remember nin and jin though, they just kinda work out for me.
Hm yes I know I should do this more. Sometimes I focus so much on the individual readings that I don’t really take in the actual sound of the whole word. I’ve found listening to the audio helps a lot.
I started trying to do this but I kept forgetting! Now I plug in headphones and listen to the audio which is definitely helping, but because a lot of the 人 words had come up before I was doing that I’m finding they’re not as easy to remember. I also need to read more kanji irl to cement the words I’m learning here
I only just came across the Nintendo mnemonic given in 病人 and it’s made me want to go back and add it to all the にん readings now!
I do like this approach as it seems more natural but it’s so hit and miss for me I do think though sometimes I need to slow down a bit on that enter key and actually think about how it sounds!
Thanks for this one
Actually I memorize, reverse way of wanikani path. Memorizing vocabulary and deriving readings of kanji helps much better. Instead of bottom to top, i prefer top to bottom.
For example; these two words are well know I assume. daijoubu and taisetsu. Both of them have 大 kanji. When I encounter daijoubu or taisetsu, I recognize them as whole vocab and answer them accordingly.
You have mentioned jinsei above. I memorized jinsei and I know that I haven’t heard ninsei yet. So I go jinsei path which I memorized that way. Or, I have heard ningen and memorized that way also “Ningen Isu” is one of my favorite band, also haven’t heard jingen yet. I go with ningen way.
Conclusion; I don’t try to remember kanji readings and try to combine them to words, I remember words and separate them into kanjis. Sometimes if I don’t recall word, I try to guess word by kanji, but in that case, my failures are increasing also.
There is a にんせい but it does not use 人. It’s 妊性. It’s also not a WK word. That should be an easy sign that you’ll never type にんせい as an answer in a WK review. That’ll be about the only hard-and-fast rule you’ll find on this dichotomy within the WK system.
Do you listen to the audio component? Because I find that helps me out a lot.
The only ‘trick’ I have is for 何。Most of the vocab I’ve learned (that I can remember) seems to use the ‘opposite’ katakana component whenever I use 何
何日uses にちrather then the more common じつ. But even there I might be miss-remembering things.
That creates the other problem of the little voice in the back of my head with the right answer but using another answer anyway because I know better but it’s the wrong answer.